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Category: Recommended Reading
Are All Animals Of Moral Concern?
Jeff Sebo at Aeon Magazine:
You notice an ant struggling in a puddle of water. Their legs thrash as they fight to stay afloat. You could walk past, or you could take a moment to tip a leaf or a twig into the puddle, giving them a chance to climb out. The choice may feel trivial. And yet this small encounter, which resembles the ‘drowning child’ case from Peter Singer’s essay ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ (1972), raises big questions. Are ants sentient – able to experience pleasure and pain? Do they deserve moral concern? Should you take a moment out of your day to help one out?
Historically, people have had very different views about such questions. Exclusionary views – dominant in much of 20th-century Western science – err on the side of denying animals sentience and moral status. On this view, only mammals, birds and other animals with strong similarities to humans merit moral concern. Attributions of sentience and moral status require strong evidence. Human exceptionalist perspectives reinforced this view as well, holding that other animals were created for human use.
more here.
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Are we doomed?
David Runciman in London Review of Books:
People are living longer than they used to. They are also having fewer children. The evidence of what this combination can do to a society is growing around the world, but some of the most striking stories come from Japan. For decades the Japanese health ministry has released an annual tally of citizens aged one hundred or over. This year the number of centenarians reached very nearly a hundred thousand. When the survey started in 1963, there were just 153. In 1981 there were a thousand; in 1998 ten thousand. Japan now produces more nappies for incontinent adults than for infants. There is a burgeoning industry for the cleaning and fumigating of apartments in which elderly Japanese citizens have died and been left undiscovered for weeks, months or years. Older people have far fewer younger people to take care of them or even to notice their non-existence. That neglect is a brute function of some simple maths.
In 1950, Japan had a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 4, which represents the average number of children a woman might expect to have in her lifetime. Continued over five generations, that would mean a ratio of 256 great-great-grandchildren to every sixteen great-great-grandparents – in other words, each hundred-year-old might have sixteen direct descendants competing to look after them. Today Japan’s TFR is approaching 1: one child per woman (or one per couple, half a child each). That pattern continued over five generations means that each solitary infant has as many as sixteen great-great-grandparents vying for his or her attention. Within a century the pyramid of human obligation has been turned on its head.
More here.
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Cell-Electronic Hybrid Chips Could Enable Surgery-Free Brain Implants
RJ Mackenzie in The Scientist:
Brain implants can provide important insights into the nervous system and even relieve the symptoms of brain diseases. But getting implants into a patient’s head is an operation fraught with risks of tissue damage and infection.
Some approaches use blood vessels to deliver implants to the fringes of the brain, but these cannot access deep-lying areas at the roots of some of the most stubborn brain disorders. To overcome this, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by bioengineer Deblina Sarkar, took up the challenge of designing an implant with minimal footprint and maximum efficacy. In a new paper, published in Nature Biotechnology, Sarkar and her colleagues unveiled a novel implant design approach which piggybacks subcellular electronic devices to circulating immune cells. 1 The team’s wireless electronic-cell hybrids, which are powered by light, are 10 micrometers in diameter, which is smaller than a single droplet of mist. The researchers found that these devices could migrate to areas of inflammation in the mouse brain and then stimulate brain tissue with micrometer-level precision. They called their hybrids the first in a new field of “circulatronic” devices.
More here.
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David Byrne’s Career of Earnest Alienation
Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:
If you spend enough time wandering around downtown Manhattan, the odds are that you’ll eventually encounter the musician David Byrne riding a bicycle. (He owns four: a folding bike, an electric, an eight-speed, and a single-speed, which he recently lent to the pop singer Lorde.) One day this past June, pedalling alongside Byrne from his apartment in Chelsea to the Governors Island ferry, I watched at least a dozen New Yorkers clock his profile, whipping around to squint, softly pinching the arm of their companion and whispering, “Was that . . . ?” By then, Byrne was gone, a tuft of white hair whizzing toward the horizon. Spotting Byrne on two wheels has become a New York City rite of passage, like sussing out the best halal cart in midtown, or dropping something important onto the subway tracks. During the few months that Byrne and I spent together, I never saw him traverse the city via any other mode of transportation, even when the heat index was approaching hellscape and he was overdue for a meeting in Brooklyn. He simply reapplied sunscreen and pushed off. In 2023, he rode a custom white Budnitz single-speed directly onto the red carpet at the Met Gala while wearing a cream-colored turtleneck under a bespoke white suit by Martin Greenfield Clothiers. (The bike featured a belt drive, which prevented chain grease from smearing his pants; he had placed his parking placard for the gala in the basket.) In 2019, Byrne rode a bicycle onstage at the “Tonight Show” while promoting “David Byrne’s American Utopia,” a Broadway production that he wrote and starred in that year. (In 2020, it became a film, directed by Spike Lee.)
more here.
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Wednesday Poem
On a Squirrel Crossing the Road
in Autumn, In New England
It is what he does not know,
Crossing the road under the elm trees,
About the mechanism of my car,
About the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
About Mozart, India, Arcturus,
That wins my praise. I engage
At once in whirling squirrel-praise.
He obeys the orders of nature
Without knowing them.
It is what he does not know
That makes him beautiful.
Such a knot of little purposeful nature!
I who can see him as he cannot see himself
Repose in the ignorance that is his blessing.
It is what man does not know of God
Composes the visible poem of the world.
. . . Just missed him!
by Richard Eberhart
from Poet’s Choice
Time Life Books 1962
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Tuesday, November 11, 2025
Tom Cat: On duality, detachment, and life and death decisions
Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen at Longreads:
When I arrived in Harlem, I felt anguished responsibility and resentment toward the cat. He could die, I perseverated. I had imagined Manhattan from the vantage point of a twenty-something with her lover, but was now relegated to “indoor New York lesbian with dying cat.” I searched his litter for pee and poop, as though playing a weird Where’s Waldo? Tom needed anti-anxiety medication with his wet food, and I was careful with the timing and dosage. I bypassed New York City nightlife to keep the cat alive.
Despite my worries as a feline caretaker, Tom displayed what I have since learned are normal cat behaviors. He stared out the living room window overlooking the Harlem River with longing and disdain. He walked across my keyboard with apathetic audacity. One moment he would lay like a cherub, the next he would reach for a feather toy attached to a string. He protracted and retracted his claws with a bored cadence, as if to say, I’m a cat and this shit is just what I do.
I oscillated between wondering whether Tom was fighting to live or actively trying to die.
More here.
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What Is a Manifold?
Paulina Rowińska in Quanta:
Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We’re so small in comparison to the Earth that from our point of view, it looks flat.
The world is full of such shapes — ones that look flat to an ant living on them, even though they might have a more complicated global structure. Mathematicians call these shapes manifolds. Introduced by Bernhard Riemann in the mid-19th century, manifolds transformed how mathematicians think about space. It was no longer just a physical setting for other mathematical objects, but rather an abstract, well-defined object worth studying in its own right.
This new perspective allowed mathematicians to rigorously explore higher-dimensional spaces — leading to the birth of modern topology, a field dedicated to the study of mathematical spaces like manifolds. Manifolds have also come to occupy a central role in fields such as geometry, dynamical systems, data analysis and physics.
More here.
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Who was Asherah – Wife of Yahweh?
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On Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein
Tyler Dean at Artforum:
GUILLERMO DEL TORO‘S new film adaptation of Frankenstein, 2025, hews closely to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel while weaving in design elements and plot points from its many cinematic afterlives. But, more than anything, it is a film that feels obsessed with the infamous night that the novel was first imagined, and deviates from its source material mostly to refine its point that the monster here is actually Victor Frankenstein and the Creature is a wholly innocent victim of his maker’s cruelty.
The story of Frankenstein’s inception begins with Shelley vacationing at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva with her stepsister Claire and her soon-to-be-husband, Percy, alongside writer John Polidori and the owner of the villa, Lord Byron. Byron was a luminary of the Romantic movement, equally famous for his rakish behavior, mounting debts, rumors of incestuous affairs, and bellicose, passionate temperament (from which we derive the term “Byronic”). Shelley and Byron had a complicated friendship, equal parts admiration and revulsion, strained by his affair with Claire and growing tensions with Percy (during that summer, Percy wrote that Byron was “a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds”).
more here.
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Sean Carroll: How Philosophers Corrected a Fundamental Error in Physics
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Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found
Kathryn Murphy at Literary Review:
From the sparse scatter of documents testifying to the life of Vermeer, many of them forbiddingly brief or boring or purely legal, Graham-Dixon constructs a compelling story. But it is a story – like those fictions which Vermeer’s paintings, with that mysterious charge of meaningfulness, have frequently inspired. Here, narrative drive is supplied by Vermeer’s supposed enmity with his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, a Catholic woman who, though she at first refused to condone her daughter’s marriage to a Protestant, thawed sufficiently to allow him and his family to live in her house. Facts which suggest Vermeer accommodated himself to the Catholic faith, an assumption which has informed much recent scholarship, are explained away as the triumphs of Maria. Two of the Vermeers’ many children were called Ignatius and Franciscus and another sent away to train for the priesthood – Graham-Dixon sees this as ‘a resounding victory’ for Maria’s ‘militant Catholicism’ over Vermeer’s Collegiant will. The accoutrements of a Catholic household chapel which appear in the inventory of his goods drawn up after his death were only acquired ‘through gritted teeth’. Early modern confessional hostilities are still being fought in the book’s prose: the Catholics ‘were all in it together’; Vermeer was ‘living in a nest of Jesuits’.
more here.
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What Socialism Got Right
Kristen Ghodsee at The MIT Press Reader:
Twenty years ago, in November of 2005, Duke University Press published my first book: “The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea.” Produced in the wake of socialism’s global collapse and the riot of Western triumphalism that ensued, I deployed both qualitative and quantitative methods to advance a simple, but unpopular, argument: For most people in the former Soviet bloc, capitalism sucked.
By writing the “small histories” of men and women laboring in Bulgaria’s vibrant tourism industry in the decade following their country’s mad dash to embrace democracy and free markets, I explored how and why this small southeastern European country transformed from a relatively predictable, orderly, egalitarian society into a chaotic, lawless world of astonishing inequality and injustice. I wrapped my critiques of the rampant neoliberalism of the “Wild, Wild, East” in thickly descriptive accounts of the lives of chambermaids, bartenders, tour guides, cooks, waitresses, and receptionists. I wanted to show, not tell.
More here.
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How We’re Creating the Dumbest Generation in History
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The computers that run on human brain cells
David Adam in Nature:
In a town on the shores of Lake Geneva sit clumps of living human brain cells for hire. These blobs, about the size of a grain of sand, can receive electrical signals and respond to them — much as computers do. Research teams from around the world can send the blobs tasks, in the hope that they will process the information and send a signal back.
Welcome to the world of wetware, or biocomputers. In a handful of academic laboratories and companies, researchers are growing human neurons and trying to turn them into functional systems equivalent to biological transistors. These networks of neurons, they argue, could one day offer the power of a supercomputer without the outsized power consumption.
More here.
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Tuesday Poem
The Mountain and the River
In my country there is a mountain.
In my country there is a river.
Come with me.
Night climbs up to the mountain.
Hunger goes down to the river.
Come with me.
Who are those who suffer?
I do not know, but they are my people.
Come with me.
I do not know, but they call to me
and they say to me: “We suffer.”
Come with me.
And they say to me: “Your people,
your luckless people,
between the mountain and the river,
with hunger and grief,
they do not want to struggle alone,
they are waiting for you, friend.”
by Pablo Neruda
from The Captains Verses
New Directions Books, 1972
Original Spanish at “read more”
Monday, November 10, 2025
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life
Erik Baker at The Drift:
Turning to philosophy to learn how to live is nothing new, of course. But the explicitly inspirational and instructional valence of much that appears today under that heading, even from academic presses, is striking — as is the apparent consensus that the central task of philosophy is to guide seekers to a greater acceptance of imperfection and insignificance. Sometimes these books focus on a particular school of philosophy, giving readers an “-ism” — existentialism, Buddhism, Taoism, and above all Stoicism, now practically a genre unto itself — with which to identify. Others staple together eclectic smatterings of received ideas into less partisan surveys on how to cope with failure and disillusionment.
The self-help industry has in turn embraced this conception of “philosophy,” to the point where it’s no longer always clear whether to categorize a given book of advice as philosophy or self-help in the first place.
More here.
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A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood
Paper by Joel Z. Leibo, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, William A. Cunningham, and Stanley M. Bileschi at Arxiv:
The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a “Cambrian explosion” of new kinds of personhood. This paper proposes a pragmatic framework for navigating this diversification by treating personhood not as a metaphysical property to be discovered, but as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights and responsibilities) that societies confer upon entities for a variety of reasons, especially to solve concrete governance problems. We argue that this traditional bundle can be unbundled, creating bespoke solutions for different contexts. This will allow for the creation of practical tools — such as facilitating AI contracting by creating a target “individual” that can be sanctioned — without needing to resolve intractable debates about an AI’s consciousness or rationality. We explore how individuals fit in to social roles and discuss the use of decentralized digital identity technology, examining both “personhood as a problem”, where design choices can create “dark patterns” that exploit human social heuristics, and “personhood as a solution”, where conferring a bundle of obligations is necessary to ensure accountability or prevent conflict. By rejecting foundationalist quests for a single, essential definition of personhood, this paper offers a more pragmatic and flexible way to think about integrating AI agents into our society.
More here.
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James Watson died a couple of days ago, so here’s a rare interview with both Watson and Crick
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The Increasingly Complex Science of Political Identity
C. Brandon Ogbunu at Undark:
Questions about voting patterns have long been the object of inquiry from thinkers across a breadth of fields, and especially in social science domains like political science, psychology, and economics. Studies in these realms are often reflective and retrospective, telling detailed stories of how, for example, the American electorate has changed over decades. These scholars ideally slow-cook these stories through meticulous analysis before they enter a peer review process that itself operates at a snail’s pace.
But because coverage of elections is such a time-sensitive endeavor, we often rely on the quick trigger of political journalists to tell us the stories at the timescale that we need to grasp the world around us. To have enough information to cast a vote on election day, we may need to know how the race for mayor has changed on a given day and what those changes mean. The problem here, well known throughout journalism, is that the rush to report can sensationalize or oversimplify voting dynamics.
More here.
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